Joe sat on the toilet seat, singing “Oh! Susanna” in the soft, slow way James Taylor recorded it. His singing was like a lullaby, but it didn’t soothe the baby.
She cried. She was limp. I wanted to take her to the hospital right then, but Joe said no.
“It’s too risky. She could pick up a worse infection in the hospital,” he said. “Let’s do what Dr. Gordon said.”
I sponged Julie down with the tepid water and when we were both wrinkled, Joe helped us out of the bath and we took her with us into bed.
Her temperature had dropped to 102. It was a change in the right direction, but still outside my comfort zone. I called Dr. Gordon again and she phoned back at just before ten that night.
“It’s probably nothing. Try not to worry,” she said.
“Right,” I said into the phone.
“If her temperature goes to a hundred and four, take her straight to the emergency room.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you in the morning. Try to get some sleep.”
“Thanks, Doctor,” I said.
No one slept at our house except Martha, and we were at the doctor’s office as soon as the doors opened.
Dr. Gordon weighed Julie, examined her, made notes on her chart. The doctor’s expression was so neutral I couldn’t read it, not even between the lines.
“I wish she’d put on a little more weight,” she said.
“She’s been fussy from the beginning,” I said.
“I’m going to draw some blood. Standard procedure,” said the doctor. “Just to get a baseline.”
Joe held Julie as the stick pricked my daughter’s tiny pink heel. Julie howled, of course, and I just hid my face until it was over.
I asked the doctor to tell us everything. “Don’t hold anything back.”
Finally, Dr. Gordon cracked a smile.
“She’s got a fever, but it’s not abnormal. I’ll call you when I get back her blood work. Meanwhile, you should all get some sleep.”
As soon as I hit the sheets, my cell phone rang. I read the caller ID and then told Brady, “Whatever it is has got to wait. I need four hours of sleep. Just four.”
Brady ignored me.
“Boxer, that streetcar driver on the F line?”
“What? Who?”
“Your professor said a streetcar driver was going to be shot, remember?”
“Oh. No. Don’t tell me.”
“We’ve got a female streetcar driver who took a bullet about an hour ago. Right between the eyes. Just like the professor said.”
Chapter 49
BY THE TIME I dragged myself to the Ferry Building, at the Embarcadero and Market Street, the perimeter was in place and the building was the backdrop for a messy crime scene made worse by the stationary streetcar and the throttled morning rush.
Of the three lanes of traffic running in each direction, four were stopped cold and the other two were stalled. There is a wide median strip adjacent to the streetcar tracks, a strip of plaza between the northbound and southbound lanes. On any other day, this strip would have been busy with buskers, mimes, cyclists, and skateboarders. Now, in place of all the activity, there were black-and-white cruisers, ambulances, the crime scene mobile unit, and traffic cops.
I parked the Explorer at the edge of the pack of law enforcement vehicles and headed toward the evidence tent that had been set up on the median. I picked out Conklin and Morales, who were talking to Clapper and a stocky guy I didn’t know. He had an authoritative air and tiny little eyes.
He had to be our temporary medical examiner.
Conklin introduced me to Dr. Morse, and I said, “Pleased to meet you.” Then I asked Conklin to give me the details.
“That’s the primary crime scene,” he said, pointing to the 1940s-style green-and-cream-colored trolley.
Conklin said, “The victim is still in there. Her name is Janet Rice, thirty-four, African American, married with two children. She’s been working as a driver for sixteen years.”
“She’s black?”
“She was on her usual route,” Conklin said. “There was a shot fired. She was killed instantly.”
“Tell me we’ve got some witnesses,” I said.
“Someone pulled the door lever and everyone who could get out did. A bystander called nine-one-one. Units are canvassing now.”
I heard my name and turned to see Paul Chi and his partner, Cappy McNeil, coming toward me.
Chi had been bodyguarding a blond streetcar driver and McNeil had been shadowing Professor Judd.
Chi said, “Sergeant, the driver we identified with the blond hair is Tara Moffett. Always works the F line. I’ve been her constant companion for the last week, and Lemke took the second shifts. Ms. Moffett is a hundred percent fine. I’d say she wasn’t the target.”
The sun was beating down. There were sailboats out on the bay. This should have been a beautiful sight, but there were also helicopters overhead, news choppers. If there was anything worse than a shooting, it was a shooting that affected the city’s tourist business.
The video guys in the helicopters were getting phenomenal photos that would play brilliantly on national television. The San Francisco Bay. The bridges. The sailboats on the sun-flecked waves. The streetcar in front of the monumental Ferry Building and the buglike cruisers around the evidence tent.
McNeil said, “I watched the professor night and day. Samuels watched him when I was off duty. Professor Judd couldn’t have taken a shit without our knowing it.”
To my left, Brady was lifting the barrier tape for the mayor, then both of them came toward us.
“Brief the lieutenant, will you?” I said to Conklin. “I’ve got to call home.”
Chapter 50
THE INSIDE OF the streetcar was crawling with crime techs in bunny suits and booties, shooting pictures, capturing prints, trying not to fall over one another or step in potential evidence.
I stood on the street, looking through the open folding doors at the front part of the streetcar, especially at the driver’s seat, where Janet Rice had been sitting before she stopped at Market to take on passengers.
A dozen feet away from me, Conklin and Morales were at the doors in the middle of the car, Conklin explaining crime scene procedure even as Claire’s stand-in, Dr. Morse, stood impatiently behind him.
Janet Rice’s body was lying across from Conklin, her head and shoulders wedged between two seats, legs in the aisle, blood pooling under her head and running under the seat behind her.
As Judd described his dream, he had been about to hand his ticket to the driver when she took a shot between the eyes. So if the dream matched reality, the shooter would have been standing behind the professor and would have fired the gun from over his shoulder.
If that was true, Rice’s killer had likely waited for the streetcar to stop. He had climbed aboard, or maybe just stood on the top step. From there, he had a fleeting clear shot at the driver and had taken it. Then, as all eyes went to the victim, he’d stepped back down onto the street and blended into the crowd.
As the ME’s techs struggled to remove the victim, I heard Morales say to Conklin, “I’m going to do my dissertation on this psychic angle. Whether the professor is clairvoyant or not, this case has all the elements of a classic serial killing.”
